You Have the Wrong Man

by Maria Flook

  “No first-name basis?” she said.

  He stared at the whorls of snow which collected and condensed momentarily into reassuring shapes, cartoon cats and rabbits, and then dispersed, sifting right and left.

  “Well, I understand these things,” she told him, “names are such a grab bag.” She looked as if she was trying to decide if she was going to accept him instead of his brother, the certified inspector whom she had spoken to over the telephone. “You’re an expert? Like your brother?” she asked him.

  “My brother couldn’t make it tonight. I can do the job, same as him.”

  “The big thing,” she said, “is how to get inside. Just look at it, will you? This church is spooky when it’s empty—sort of Gothic.” She looked up at the high windows, which were an impenetrable slate-green.

  Peterson said, “There’s no one here to let us in? I thought it was funny not to see anyone. I don’t know about this.”

  “It’s locked. But it’s to our advantage that there’s no one here. You see, they think I’m a nuisance. I’m sort of eighty-sixed.”

  “You asked us to come out here unannounced? The place is dark.”

  “It’s always dark somewhere. At any one time, half the world is dark—did you ever think of that? Does that stop the professionals?” She looked at the empty building. “This is the fellowship hall and the preschool wing. I know where the lights are once we get in there.”

  Peterson said, “Let’s see if I understand this. There’s nobody in the building? We aren’t expected tonight?”

  “No. But, Christ,” she snapped at him, “it’s not exactly an ice cream social.”

  “We have a problem here.”

  “Can’t you get the samples?” she told him. “You don’t need the pastor for that. Let’s just take the dust and say no more.”

  “We told you we need something in writing before we take the samples,” he told her. He noticed how he had switched to saying “we.” He decided he wouldn’t let that happen again.

  She, too, changed her tone; her voice became more solicitous, girlish but firm, like a waitress running out of patience when sometimes he was too sleepy making his breakfast order. “Look, is it the money?” she said. “I’m going to have all the parents chip in once I explain the situation to them.” She shook a tight leather glove from her left hand, using her teeth to tug it free. “Do you want me to pay now? I’ll pay you in advance. I don’t have anything on me, but I can get an advance from my boss at the Supper Club. I’m hostess there. I can get something like a down payment.”

  “Money isn’t the first consideration. The problem is,” Peterson was telling her, “you don’t own this building. Am I right?”

  “Correct.”

  “Need permission from the owner,” he told her.

  She lifted her shoulders and tugged the collar of her coat higher. She walked in a small circle before him. He watched her profile one way, then the other. There was something feral in the way she shifted back and forth before him. She was wearing a cranberry leather trench coat, open at the collar. Beneath that, she wore a deep V-neck sweater, something like mohair. The fluff against the crisp leather upset him. His sister-in-law sometimes wore sweaters like this, the feathery hairs rising and falling with her breath, or she’d wear a quilted satin bathrobe. Certain fabrics hitched and draped around a woman’s curves—these odd textures, mohair or pillowed satin—made his abdomen clench.

  His brother and sister-in-law took him in after his trouble at the dog track last spring. He had been hired to clean the pens. It was tedious work, scooping the loops of waste into a barrel and hosing the cement. He cleaned the drains, running a snake rather than using Liquid Plumr. Chemical solvents caused fumes to permeate the kennel. Kennel maintenance was the only work he could get after he had wrecked a big Massey-Ferguson plow and his urine test turned up a profile of cannabis-related enzymes.

  He had worked at the dog track only two months when two men came into the barn. They walked directly into the pen with the ex-champion, Believe Me, a veteran brindle greyhound. The dog hadn’t been winning for a year. Peterson was at the far end of the barn, teasing the string open on a bag of garden lime. If the men saw him, they didn’t much care. He figured they were up to no good. The dog was overinsured. Its time was coming up. He heard one of the men talking to the doomed mutt, punctuated by the other’s bitter chuckle. When Peterson walked over there, he saw a man cutting silver duct tape from a roll while his partner straddled the dog, resting one knee on its withers to keep it still. He pinched its muzzle as the other wound the duct tape around the dog’s delicate, dished face until its chops were sealed shut. He wrapped the tape around its narrow snout, pressing a sticky strip across its glistening black nostrils. The dog reacted immediately, bucking loose from the man’s legs, whipping its head right and left and pawing its face with its dewclaw hooks. The men turned away and lit up smokes. Peterson walked up to the pen. The men looked right through him. He was invisible. They were so secure in their fiendish system, they didn’t expect interference. Not from him. The dog had fallen back on its haunches. Its eyes rolled back in its head, then refocused once. It quite suddenly reclined on its side and convulsed. Peterson started for the greyhound, but the men flicked their butts to the cement. One said, “Don’t touch anything.”

  Later that summer Peterson was arrested for possession of marijuana and his brother bailed him out of the city jail. His brother gave him work at Dover Environmental. Peterson took the job and tried to move to his own apartment. His sister-in-law went to inspect the rental property and found it unsuitable for him. His sister-in-law had the final word as surrogate matriarch or warden. He had to watch her drift around the house in her nightie and polish her toenails in front of the TV, bending her knee and resting her foot on the ottoman until the soft, creamy bulge of her inner thigh was revealed. She wasn’t aware of him. He was nothing to her but a delinquent foster child.

  He looked back at his client.

  Her bare skin, the fluff, the leather. These gradations. Then it was the snow. The snow melted in a ragged necklace across her bare breastbone. She didn’t seem chilled. She looked slightly overheated; the snow dotted her shoulders like the tepid icing on hot cinnamon rolls.

  And she didn’t dress like women who typically worried about the environment. He thought those women usually wore hiking attire or the floral Indian prints of hippie fashions. This Angela Snyder was wearing a tight skirt, above the knee, and a bright blue sweater, dense as rabbit fur, just like the hostess at a steak house was expected to look. He noticed that her hair was loosely permed—at home, inexpertly—and frosted in uneven patches. Her mouth, touched with pencil, made her lips oddly defined, dingy at the edges.

  She pulled up from her circle and said, “Can you tell me one thing? Peterson, who owns a church? I mean, who owns a church?” She smiled. Waited. She looked utterly merry stating her point.

  “You think it’s funny?” he said. “Who owns a church? It’s like a knock, knock? Some kind of punch line? You should have squared this away before you called me out here.”

  “You? I thought it was going to be the other guy, your brother. He seemed to have some experience.”

  Peterson turned to get back in his truck. He opened the door and rested one foot on the rocker panel, lifting his hip so it rested against the high seat.

  “Oh wait,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m not fooling around. I don’t have the faintest idea who owns this church. It’s some kind of congregation, right? Well, what about these asbestos fibers? Invisible. It’s my little boy. It hasn’t exactly been a picnic. Three years at the Fairfax Supper Club. First I was at Steak & Ale, now I’m at the Fairfax. One pay stub. I’m on my way to work now. Right after this. The hours. You should know my hours. And now, this hazard. This risk. I mean, maternal instincts. Instincts have a life of their own—” She kept talking until her explanation became wholly monosyllabic.

  Peterson noticed how her breast heaved lightly a
fter she was finished. Her delicate respirations suggested her feminine triumph. Her words coming fast, clipped, until it was severe litany—then her breathless calm. She had him going for a moment. He extracted a toothpick from its delicate white wrapper and poked it through his bottom incisors and sawed it back and forth over his gums.

  “There’s usually a board of trustees,” Peterson told her. He was putting his key in the ignition and the dash lit up like a hospital wall. “Get in here with me and I’ll tell you what I need before I go in that building,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” she said. She walked around to the other side of the truck but skirted the open passenger door. “Who do you think I am?” she said. She walked over to the front door of the church and tugged it with her bare hand. She put both hands on the brass pull and rattled the heavy panel.

  He jumped out of the cab and told her she had misunderstood him. Then he saw she was laughing, pressing her one gloved hand over her teeth. Her teeth against the leather made a tight, squeaking sound.

  He watched her while twirling the toothpick against his tongue, using his thumb and forefinger to keep it turning. “Shit,” Peterson said, “I was going to explain the legalities. A church like this probably has a board of trustees. We need their consent before we can enter the premises and take away incriminating samples.”

  “They’ll never let you.”

  “Sure they will.”

  “Trust me,” she said. “It’s now or never.”

  She started to walk away in the snow, following the slight troughs and indented lines on the sidewalk. He followed her around the building to the back. He saw the small playground, which faced the old church cemetery. He never imagined these two worlds could exist in tandem, one beside the other, the tiny jungle gym for toddlers and, twenty feet over, the rough, flinty slate of antique graves. Were these first and last groups harmonious or indifferent? He felt his scalp sting when he imagined the relationship might even be some kind of malevolent entanglement.

  “See this playground?” she told him. He was already staring at it. “It’s not up to standards, but I found out where to get free sand. The sand is supposed to be four inches deep to make a good cushion so the kids won’t get hurt.”

  Peterson noticed the high ridges of sand, dunes of it, capped with snow. He toed the sand and saw it was gray and gritty, like the stuff he’d seen at municipal ball fields. Flaked rock that got into your socks if you had to slide into base.

  She said, “That’s Vulcan’s washed screenings from Vulcan Quarry. They give it away free to nonprofit organizations.”

  “You had them deliver it here? These washed screenings?” The name for it sounded absurd.

  She told him, “The truck had a hard time getting around the gravestones to dump it here. The load was so heavy, they thought it might roll over an unmarked pocket—you know, a grave. The dirt would cave in. It was one more thing for the church to bitch about.” She turned back to look at the dark building. “These are the classrooms, here, in this basement wing.” She pointed to the preschool rooms. “These windows push out from the inside. I’ll find one that isn’t locked and we can pry it open,” she told him.

  “We’re not going to destroy any property to get in there. If it doesn’t come easy, that’s it for me,” Peterson said.

  “Look, you say you’re an expert? Well, you should know how important this is. All these babies, some still on the bottle, rolling around in asbestos.”

  “That’s your guess, anyway,” Peterson told her. “Why don’t you find another day-care center for your boy? Why are you making such a hassle for yourself?”

  “Do you have kids?” she said. “If you had some kids, you’d know.”

  “Who says I don’t?” He didn’t like her making these grand assumptions.

  She told him, “Let me tell you something. Listen to me. When you have children, it’s cash on the line.”

  “You make it sound rewarding,” he told her.

  “I mean it. I can’t afford to pay professional day care when I already pay a sitter who comes five to twelve each night. You know what that runs? Plus the two-liter bottles of Coke she has to have. I’m just trying to steer my own ship. These asbestos fibers. You should know. Microscopic.”

  “You can’t be sure it’s asbestos, it’s not proved yet,” he told her, but the way she described it made him think of a barge with a hundred babies drifting into a sea of monolithic chrysotile structures.

  Until this time, he had not experienced the subtle pressures of his job at Dover Environmental. His usual routine consisted, singularly, of light tasks. Cutting chunks of friable asbestos insulation from heating ducts and plumbing, brushing particle samples together, sealing them in plastic bags and shipping them off to a state-certified lab, where the materials were tested using transmission electron microscopy. Some days he set up the large three-horsepower fans for aggressive air samples. He wasn’t involved with the testing procedures or the subsequent discovery of the facts. He never once envisioned a personal consequence, it was always general. It was for the health of the general public, the general upkeep of industry.

  She told him, “This tile is probably thirty years old. It’s totally abraded. Like cake flour, dense and weird. You’ll see once we get in there.”

  She was checking the windows, trying to insert her fingernails under the aluminum moldings so she could tug. Everything was tight. Then she found a window that wasn’t fastened. On the inside pane, yellow construction-paper ducks were taped in a neat row. She pressed her cheek against the glass, trying to inch it free; Peterson saw the little ducks behind her face. Peterson went over and jerked the window open. The entrance was at a hard angle and was hardly enough room for her, let alone for a man his size.

  “I can’t get through that,” he told her.

  “No kidding,” she said, turning to look at him square. “Of course, I don’t expect you to come through this window. I’ll squeeze inside here, then I’ll go around and let you in the door. You get the red carpet and don’t have to rip your pants.”

  He walked a tiny, almost imperceptible box step when she spoke those words. When she turned away, he looked at her, following her legs until they disappeared at the hem of her coat. Her hair was loose and knotty beneath a melting crown. She looked back at him, making the okay sign with her thumb and index finger. He studied her but the snow started to come heavy, like a glittering fiberglass curtain between them.

  He raised his voice to mask his rocky feelings. “Be my guest,” he told her. “Climb in that window. It’s not up to me. Breaking into a house of worship. Not every day I witness this sort of thing.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a priss,” she said. “I’ll get in, and then you can come through the proper door. It’s on my shoulders then, right?”

  He rubbed his hand down his forehead and over the sharp, freezing tip of his nose. He was getting into something. Peterson tried to figure how he could run the tests at the lab without his brother knowing. He struggled to ignore the children, the way he pictured them, on the swing set beside the tombs, or on the drifting barge.

  Perhaps it was the snow, the ice specks pumping around the streetlight that gave everything an unnatural surge. He was excited by the first weather of the year, and by this woman, who seemed to have put him in an obedient trance. He started to trust it.

  As she climbed through the window, her coat snagged on something and the leather was gouged. She cursed, rubbing the hide between her fingers in the near dark. Then Peterson lost sight of her as she moved away from the window to find a light switch. He was out there in the churchyard, alone. He thought about Believe Me, the silver tape locking its muzzle shut. After ten minutes the men had gone back into the pen to unwind the metallic strips. They used a terry-cloth rag to carefully clean the short fur and whiskers on its refined, scooped face, to remove any telltale adhesive.

  He heard Angela calling his name. He walked up and down the length of the building, trying to find her vo
ice, his boots sliding through new ribbons of snow. Then she was taking his arm, pulling him through a side door. She led him down the hallway to the playroom, which was pitch-black, but he could smell the dust. He heard her as she patted the cement walls with her palms, trying to find the light switch. She touched it and the fluorescents fluttered on.

  “See, it’s everywhere.” She twirled slowly in the center of the room. She pointed to the dusty corners, the glazed toys and tricycles. She ran her fingertip along the window ledge and showed him the lemon-yellow powder. “It’s even in the light fixtures. They ride the trikes and it rises up this high.”

  He squatted down and rubbed the palm of his hand over the floor’s surface. “Christ, this tile’s completely abraded, porous.”

  “There’s asbestos in this kind of tile, am I right?” she asked him.

  “See that over there?” he told her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Those old shuffleboard inlays. You never see these anymore. That’s from the 1950s. This is some old linoleum.”

  “Asbestos?” She looked at him. “Well. What are you waiting for? Get the samples. Get everything we need,” she told him. Her eyes were glossy, triumphant and desperate in one halting gaze.

  He suggested going for drinks. They had finished scooping up dust from little drifts around the legs of the playhouse and from underneath the foam mats near the wooden slide. “Let’s go have something when we’re done here,” he told her.

  She acknowledged his invitation. Her eyes rolled around once and returned to a businesslike squint. She pushed the side of her hand along the floor, making piewedge swipes through the dust. He was closing a plastic bag, turning a twist tie until it was secure. “How about it?” he asked her, but he didn’t want to look at her to see if she rolled her eyes again. He was thinking that he had been utterly professional in his handling of the situation up until that very moment. Other than the fact that he was trespassing, and stealing property, he was on the level. When she didn’t answer him, he returned to the same, worn-out declaration, “I don’t like taking these samples without the proper consent. In writing.”